This afternoon, while half of the other people in the coffeeshop were reading the latest Harry Potter book, I got back to work on my own novel. The Rowling books have their detractors, for certain, but I have to admit I’m curious to see how they turn out. And I really, really don’t want to overhear the conclusion. (This afternoon there was a particularly loud young woman at the table next to me talking about the book, so I put in my earphones and cranked up my music.)
Curious as I am, it felt awfully good to be sitting there doing my own thing instead of consuming someone else’s. It’s a similar instinct, actually — the urge to lose onesself in imagination. It’s certainly scarier to track down your own and risk putting it out into the world, especially when you see all the little lizards with bloodied teeth jumping on the resident mammoth of your species.
There’s an inevitability to these projects: I just find my way back to them, and I can trust now that I will. This week was a challenge, though, first being sick; then I misbehaved and stayed up really late again to play a videogame as a tantrum, because I was frustrated with work, and this led me to having a relapse of my cold.
This week, everyone seemed to want to change the pieces I’d written; apparently this is a common occurrence for freelance writers — H.G. Wells once said “There is no greater human urge than the desire to rewrite someone else’s copy” — but this time it got under my skin. I had a talk with my editor about what she wanted changed, and by the end of the conversation I agreed with her, and had learned some things to look out for in the future. She’s also great at reassuring me that she believes in my ability; it’s just that the company has a very specific voice. So that made it better. (The other people in my client organisation, who change work seemingly for the sake of it, I just have to learn to live with.) Still, it was all a bit confidence-jarring at the time, so getting back into my own book, particularly in the wake of this Harry Potter asteroid hitting the planet, just had to wait.
And today it happened, so all’s well. I went back and re-edited the first four chapters, which helped to reawaken the story for me, then I outlined Chapter Five. I intended to only write the first paragraph or two, following that advice from Hemingway: always end your writing day with something incomplete, so you’re not starting cold the next day. This way you start back knowing you’ve already got a fish tugging on your line. But, oops, I kept going and finished the first chunk of the chapter.
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p>I promise it’ll be finished soon. I’m happy to get back to that world.
